Female Sexuality and Modes of Communication in Nineteenth- Century Transatlantic Literature
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‘Transportation is physical, communication is psychical’: Female Sexuality and Modes of Communication in Nineteenth- Century Transatlantic Literature Thesis submitted for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy at the Department of English University of Lancaster September, 2014 Mohammed Hamdan, M.A. Acknowledgments Let me thank everyone who has been there to inspire and guide me throughout my doctoral study at Lancaster University. To my supervisor Andrew Tate, I owe a massive thank you for his persistent support, inspiring conversations and helpful editing of my thesis chapters. I also deeply thank the academic staff members at the Department of English for their wonderful insight and never-failing motivation; John Schad, Sally Bushell, Michael Greaney, Jo Carruthers, Arthur Bradley, Alison Findlay, Liz Oakley-Brown, Hilary Hinds and everyone else. To all my colleagues, especially Alan Gregory, Harriet Newnes and Abby Edmunds for proofreading and feedback, I very much thank you for your constant encouragement and assistance. A doctoral degree can be a tough job, but with the unflagging help of Rachel White, everything becomes easy and possible. I am greatly grateful to Rachel for her interesting ideas and chats, helpful editing and lovely humour. I would like to send a big Thank You to home, to my parents, brothers, sister and late uncle, Taysir Jaber, who have constantly been the source of my enthusiasm and diligence. I owe you so much. And finally, I dedicate this thesis to the memory of all innocent lives of Palestinians who were killed during the recent deadly Israeli aggression against Gaza beginning in July 2014. May your beautiful souls rest in peace! ‘Transportation is physical, communication is psychical’: Female Sexuality and Modes of Communication in Nineteenth-Century Transatlantic Literature Thesis submitted for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy at the Department of English University of Lancaster September, 2014 Mohammed Hamdan, M.A. Abstract This thesis connects the discourses of transatlanticism, erotic communication, women and agency in the nineteenth century. It examines four modes of communication: mesmerism, spiritualism, telegraphism and epistolary correspondence, in relation to discourses of female sexuality and power in Anglo-American literature. The exploration of these modes from a feminist point of view will help re-evaluate the presence of women within nineteenth-century transatlantic communication systems and specifically the representation of female voices within public spaces. The Industrial Revolution and the increase of transportation between Britain and America enabled the emergence of various forms of psychic and written communication that constituted a solid background for gender subversion. Women’s active participation in mesmerism and spiritualism, which prevailed on both sides of the Atlantic during the 1830s and late 1840s, was a significant cultural subject that opened the door for unconventional reinterpretations of gender roles within clairvoyant systems of mediation. The description of women’s performative acts during mesmeric and spiritualist practices in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables (1851), Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone (1868), Florence Marryat’s There Is No Death (1891) and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s Three Spiritualist Novels (1868; 1883; 1887) subverts the gendering of communication and discourse as masculine. Bodily acts of mesmerised women such as gazing and female mediums’ acoustic contact with spirits through the sound effects of table-rapping violate the boundaries between domestic and social spheres and warrant their sexual autonomy. Moving from supernatural to embodied forms of communication, the thesis explores the place of Anglo-American women within nineteenth-century written correspondence such as telegrams and letters, the circulation of which helps acknowledge female desire outside the domestic space and subverts patriarchal spatial structures. With reference to Henry James’s In the Cage (1898), Charles Dickens’s Martin Chuzzlewit (1844) and Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Purloined Letter’ (1844), the thesis shows how women act as conduits of their sexual desire and become agents of knowledge exchange via working at telegraph offices or simply writing and posting private letters. In relation to this, the thesis also considers the association between epistolary adestination, desire, flames and textual purity in Dickens and Poe’s fictions of fire. The thesis concludes that women’s interactive presence in nineteenth-century communication systems continues to influence and develop twentieth- and twenty-first-century media for the empowerment of feminine sexual expression against opposing patriarchal voices. I declare that this thesis is my own work, and has not been submitted in substantially the same form for the award of a higher degree elsewhere Contents Introduction 1 • ‘Transoceanic’ Relationships: Britain, America and Literary Textual Exchanges, 1830-1903 6 • ‘Letters are venerable; and the telephone valiant’: Modes of Sexual Communication in Nineteenth-Century Transatlantic Writing 19 • Towards a Theoretical Framework 36 Chapter One “‘Am I awake? – Am I awake?’”: Carnal Mesmerism and Bizarre Sexuality in Hawthorne and Collins 43 Chapter Two ‘A low, hissing sound came close to my ear [...] The very idea was a terror’: Sex, Spirits and Invisible Communications 88 Chapter Three ‘Boudoirs in the telegrams’? : Language of the Cable and Electric Scandals in Henry James 132 Chapter Four ‘On Errands of Life, these Letters Speed to Death’: Erotic Destination and the Female Epistle in Dickens and Poe 178 Chapter Five ‘Walworth. Burn this [letter] as soon as read’: Letters/Bodies Ablaze; Correspondence Suspended in Dickens’s and Poe’s Fictions of Fire 207 Conclusion 237 Bibliography 248 To my Parents 1 Introduction ‘Transportation is physical, communication is psychical’:1 Female Sexuality and Modes of Communication in Nineteenth-Century Transatlantic Literature Hatred, resentment, esteem, love, courage, mirth, and melancholy; all these passions I feel more from communication than from my own natural temper and disposition. (David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, 1740)2 This thesis is a study of the relationship between communication and sexuality in nineteenth- century transatlantic literature. It explores four main modes of communication – mesmerism, spiritualism, telegraphism and epistolarity – with particular emphasis on female sexuality. Hume (1711-1776) asserts the centrality of communication in the exchange of human emotional states. ‘Love’ and ‘passions’, for example, are effectively revealed in the acts of communication that tie people with feelings and constitute a concrete house of desire. Hume’s observation of the emotional potential of communication is typified by the technological and social developments of the Industrial Revolution. The quick advances of the nineteenth century opened the door for women to interrogate social boundaries and demonstrate sexual liberation through communicative practices. This change, however, was not restricted to one part of the world; it covered a larger geographical scope across the Atlantic waters, and presented Britain and America as two growing nations in conversation. The thesis thus sheds light on the sexual and discursive exchange of information within a wider context of transatlanticism. Inspired by psychoanalysis, feminism and deconstructive theories, I add to the extensive field of Anglo- 1 Charles Horton Cooley, The Theory of Transportation (Baltimore: American Economics Association, 1894), p. 70. 2 David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, 3 vols, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge (Oxford: Clarendon, 1978), 2. 294. 2 American comparative literary studies a thesis which specifically examines erotic communication in nineteenth-century transatlantic literature.3 Going further back in time, we see Plato’s (427 BC – 347 BC) link between eroticism and the rhetoric of communication: Socrates in Plato’s Phaedrus (370 BC) is ‘sick with passion for hearing speeches’, he boldly tells Phaedrus.4 One of these speeches redelivered by Phaedrus – originally delivered by Lysias, an actor in absentia – is on erotic love, and Socrates’s passion for Lysias’s knowledge of eroticism comes in close association with lust for the rhetoric of speeches, communication or the delivery of discourse. Even though Plato’s Phaedrus implies homosexuality mediated through a powerful discourse of knowledge, it suggests that transmission itself is the rhetorical concern of the text and the body of Lysias’s desire. Many centuries later, St. Augustine (354 AD – 430 AD) like his predecessor was fascinated by the intricacies of linguistic networks and transmission of the sign. His De Magistro (‘The Teacher’, 389 AD) thoroughly explores linguistic signs, meaning and dialogue. Yet it is in On Greatness of the Soul (388 AD), I believe, that Augustine presents an intellectual theory of communication that divides the word into sound and meaning; the former being connected to ears, bodies and thus desire while the latter to the mind and soul. 5 The representation of communication as dialectical between minds and bodies, its intricate structure and internal process are presented much later in the work of the Elizabethan and Jacobean Francis Bacon (1561-1626), whose 3 Throughout the thesis, I will interchangeably be using England, Britain or Anglo- to refer to Britain itself as one geographical unit, in correspondence with North America as the other geographical